Reading List
Abolish Oil
Places Journal
What must be abolished so that democracy may finally rise? Oil — as an industry and as a form of social organization.
Urban Auscultation
Places Journal
The mechanical operations of a transit system, the social life of a public library, the overload of hospital emergency rooms: all can be intoned through algorhythmic analysis.
Liquid Cities
Places Journal
In Japanese architecture and science fiction from the 1960s through the 1990s, we can trace an enduring question: “how to make substantial architecture when substantial things are losing their meaning.”
Design and the Green New Deal
Places Journal
If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline.
Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning
Places Journal
An urban historian assesses the complex legacy of Jane Jacobs, including the rise of community activism and the marginalization of professional planning.
Kiruna, Forever Changing
Places Journal
The forced relocation of the northernmost city in Sweden is more than a gigantic architectural project. It is also a test for a society at the crossroads.
Hagia Sophia Past and Future
Places Journal
The reconversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque is hardly a radical act. Given its complex history, the extraordinary edifice has the potential to support multiple religious practices.
Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards
Places Journal
The world’s most ambitious “smart city” project is here. Should we worry that New York City is becoming an experimental lab?
14 to 1: Post-Katrina Architecture by the Numbers
Places Journal
The focus on Make It Right might suggest that contemporary residential architecture is typical of post-Katrina New Orleans. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Backwater: Landscapes of the Mississippi Delta
Places Journal
Resuscitating the Mississippi Delta with river diversions and sediment siphons would be the world’s largest coastal restoration project. But it could happen.
Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You
Places Journal
Negotiating rhetorics and imaginaries of climate resilience in Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Bangkok.
Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: Before
Places Journal
The first installment in a two-part essay on post-Katrina New Orleans offers a precise narrative of the environmental engineering that made catastrophe inevitable.
Delta Urbanism and New Orleans: After
Places Journal
The second installment in a two-part series examines the passionate debate about how to rebuild New Orleans and prevent future disaster.
A Katrina Lexicon
Places Journal
Call it the Federal Flood or the Levee Failure of 2005 — just don’t call it Katrina! How we talk about a disaster so big we can’t agree on its name.
Mardi Gras and the Racial Geography of New Orleans
Places Journal
The Rex and Zulu parades, and the complicated racial settlement of the Crescent City.
Impossible City: New Orleans
Places Journal
Sometimes you see a picture and you can tell that something’s missing, but you don’t know what it is.